[remote]

Played some Raw Danger for a bit. Such a weird game! Seems like it might have some fun "survival" game ideas, though.

Weird how it's like one of the only PS2 games I have that actually looks super sharp on my TV via composite cables.
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[Mikey]

So I dunno, I kinda got sick of Little King's Story. The pace was just too dull, for me. I think Overlord is a better game of this type. It does a much better job of actually giving you interesting mission objectives and challenges, whereas LKS mostly feels like a series of MMO kill/fetch quests punctuated by occasional boss battles.

An interesting similarity between the two games is the fact that characters who are ostensibly your subjects basically turn you into their errand boy - I suppose it can't be helped if you actually want to involve the player-character in the action directly, but I wonder if either game was trying to comment on how a player's power fantasy is inherently undermined by the tasks that games require them to complete.

[luvcraft]

[Mikey]

[Ymer]

Finished The Witcher today. I'm on a roll here! Had this one sitting unfinished for quite a while because of technical issues. I came out feeling satisfied! For all its many, many faults I have to at least say that the ending was a pretty damned good one both in terms of sticking to the parts of what I liked about the gameplay as well closing the story pretty well.

Reading about the not completely obvious Big Twist that totally went over my head now (the boy Alvin was most probably the Grandmaster as well due to being A Source also comes with time travelling powers, the most obvious evidence of this being that depending on what lessons you teach Alvin in chapter IV causes the the Grandmaster's speeches in the Frozen Wasteland to change quite a bit and of course the aged Dimeritium Pendant found on him) pretty much makes the game neat enough to almost make me forget all the horrible swamps, identical crypts and ENDLESS fucking Drowners it makes you suffer through.

The worst part was probably the tedious inventory management and the potion brewing though. I suppose it would've been a lot more bearable if I could just learn to loosen up a bit when it comes consumable items and the like. Anyway, hopefully my royal fucking up of Temeria (accidentally sided with the Order) won't have too far-reaching consequences in The Witcher 2!

[Youpi]

I'm trying to get ahead in that horribly broken abandonware game I talked about on the previous page, by acquiring enough money to buy enough food to survive (the character needs a cheeseburger every hour, one hour goes by in 3 minutes, shops restock one cheeseburger every day).
Doubled my starting capital thanks to save-scumming and an unsporting move at one of the 3 mini-games that are the legit only sources of money. The 2 other games are absolutely unplayable.

I think reading the manual and not playing the game is the best way of playing this game. No game could possibly live up to the manual. I think I'll make a macro to capture and stitch its 100 pages, but you'd need to be 12 years old to appreciate that manual properly.
Another experience-ruining thing is how easy DOSBOX is to setup. I lack the proper emotional investment if I don't spend 3 weeks dicking around with IRQ and DMA and HIMEM and MSCDEX before I get to play the game, whatever the hell those things used to mean.

[Toups]

I started playing Star Tropics on a whim. I like this game a lot, though it does have some hilariously cheap parts (like unwittingly jumping into instant death rooms, etc). I really admire how dark and detailed the atmosphere is in contrast to the sunny island parts. I kept fantasizing about how to make an HD update of this franchise without killing all of the charm. It would be really hard to recreate the dungeon gameplay using modern methods.
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[Hekatoncheir]

Yeah Startropics is really good. The final dungeon though is incredibly difficult and unlike anything else in the game before it, so even years later replaying the game on an emulator I couldn't muster the patience to get through it, even though I really wanted to see the end of the game. To me it feels like it breaks an unspoken agreement with the player about how the game is played and how hard it is. Oh well :(

Everyone knows about the letter included with copies of the game that you have to submerge in water to find the secret code, right? In the Canadian version, the letter is written in both English and French. I like the idea that Mike's uncle couldn't remember which language he spoke, so he wrote both just in case.

the code is 747 and for some reason i will never ever forget that
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[Hekatoncheir]

Startropics 2 is full of nonsense like this



You travel through time and meet a pizza delivery guy in ancient Egypt, a piano player in an old west bar who goes into a rap song (complete with the music actually changing), and Sherlock Holmes in old London

It's a weird 80s sense of humor that permeates the whole game, at least from what I played. I should play through the whole thing one of these days
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[allensmithee]

Hekatoncheir, i dunno what your signature is from (warning forever?) but the graphic design there makes me wet.
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[Hekatoncheir]

sounds to me like you do know what it's from!

the bilingual startropics letter:







Uncle Steve/Oncle Steve
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[ReaganStein]

Played through the European campaign of trenched last night. Really enjoying the game so far but the matchmaking seems really odd, can't seem to find anyone above level 3 or so. I'm up to level 6, looking to dive into the Africa campaign tonight (Eastern US) if anyone wants to join.

Shoot me a message at GT: ReaganStein if you're interested.

[ionustron]

[Talbain]

Just finished up Dungeon Siege III. Was... alright I guess. Just another Diablo clone, but more tolerable than Torchlight at least. The ending being a vignette of all your decisions and their consequences throughout the game is rather nice (the ending was actually really nice, it was interesting to meet characters who weren't all raving psychotics).

edit: So I just started playing Fable 3. What the fuck is this? I stopped after about five minutes. My god it's just... how the fuck did a game like this get not one, but two sequels?

I do not understand this.
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[ReaganStein]

Yea I played about half of Fable 2 in one sitting and didn't ever touch it again. Everything about it was just so...bland.

[remote]

Playing Cave Story on my new DSi.

I feel like I'm a bit late to the party here, but this is exactly what I wanted when the game came out (in English) about 5 years ago.

Will be playing more of Radiant Historia this weekend, too.
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[The King]

Cave Story works nicely as a handheld game.
I played through it on my psp, I imagine the DS works just as well for it. :)
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[Tulpa]

Man Torchlight is definitely more inspiring than Dungeon Siege III.

I played about 10 minutes of the Fable III demo and felt embarrassed.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Am at 50+% in Vice City. This morning I completed enough missions to be able to start buying asset properties which I did immediately. Nearly spent all the money I had accrued up to that point in the game. Now my mini-map has a ton of little icons on it just waiting for me to dive in and start doing missions. This is how the game is meant to be played, I think, with tons of little icons on the mini-map calling out to you.
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[notbov]

Having only played the Fable 3 demo, I can safely say that Fable 3 is the best Fable 2 expansion pack the game could possibly deserve.

Probably three quarters of the way through Threads of Fate, about midway through Rue's story. The game, while easy, is just so damned charming I can't hate it. A lot of that has to do with the script and Mint, who just may be my new favorite character, even in spite of the fact that Rue's story paints her as a conniving bitch (granted, she's a conniving bitch in her story too, but she wants to rule the world so damn badly that you get caught up in her insane worldview).
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[Tlon]

I played some more LA Noire. Finished Vice. Thought it was going to get interesting. Nope! I sure do like looking at ledgers, though! And getting even more paranoid about living in a house with an ancient gas heater. Thanks, LA Noire!

I look forward to playing this, selling it, and never thinking about it again.
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Someday somethings coming
From way out beyond the stars
To kill us while we stand here
It will store our brains in mason jars

[GrimmSweeper]

Yep, A.R.E.S. is not worth it. Bosses just continue to be heavy on the cheap hits and poorly telegraphed attacks. One stage had attacks from fixed laser turrets fire from off-screen AND through walls. Third weapon you receive has a poorly defined hitbox that only hits mid-range. Too close and the particle will just float through without injury. Too far and the same thing happens which makes it difficult to judge where to shoot. Last stage had an enemy that creates an EMP field around itself that freezes you in mid-air so you can take hits for a good two, three seconds. Then the boss of that stage fires those off as slow moving projectiles in its second form.

I'm done with this game.

[Talbain]

[Rud31]

I somewhat regret giving the girl Warioware:Twisted. But playing it on a speeding twisting train seemed like the final battle.
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My Hawt Blog Vita Games

THERE ARE DEFINITELY WORSE VIDEO GAME PODCASTS

[Toups]

[drobe]

[Talbain]

[sponkmonkey]

[drobe]

Talbain, I'm in automatic agreement with you. I stopped playing Torchlight after it got boring watching minions play the game for me.
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http://i.imgur.com/9ATgokP.gif

[Pijaibros]

[GrimmSweeper]

I added minions to my repertoire with Torchlight because it beat out all other spells in terms of mana to damage output. Nothing else compared, really.

I played it until the end, but I was bored because other than bosses I was never in any danger. I even cranked the difficulty to either second highest or highest from the start.

[L]

I've been playing Atom Zombie Smasher too. It's nice. It feels satisfying to scoop up a whole bunch of civilians, and to drop an artillery strike that just barely wipes out an entire clump of zombies in the nick of time.

The plot is dispensed in a series of A Softer World-esque clip art comics between missions, and by that I mean they really do have that sense of detachment, terseness and melancholy that I associate with ASW. It's about a South American dictator, a scientist, weaponised llamas, a divorce, saying goodbye to your grandparents, and a blood-soaked coup. The zombies are only ever indirectly referred to. It's kind of refreshing, actually, how knowingly incidental and distant this plot is to the actual game. It doesn't pretend that you actually care about it any more than the play, and it doesn't pretend that you have any control over its outcome.

[Brock]

[Talbain]

I was angered the second the douche-y prince minigame forced me hug/kiss him. I wanted to punch him. Why is this not an option? Why can I not kick random people in the balls in this game? This game's stupidity has so much potential.

Where is my Saint's Row: The RPG Molyneux?
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[remote]

Played TF2 a bit. Seems especially buggy at the moment (I kept having the chat window freeze in place on me, and the waiting room screen popped up just before a match started for no apparent reason, then wouldn't let me escape out of it... loadout servers are down or something, game crashed, etc.), but it's kinda fun dominating the fresh meat playing for free.
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[Toups]

[Clumo]

Man...I beaten Live A Live, is so goddamn good, that final boss was really hard, I grinded for 2 hours to defeat it. My favorite character is Akira (Mecha) I like how he multiplies himself with psychokinesis for attacking enemies. The feudal japan chapter is my favorite, it's the more complex and it's kinda big, i didn't find the giant karpa, the robot and an optional boss.

The gameplay is more tight than what I thought at the start, in more advanced fights you have to be careful when you move or when to pass. The music is great. It's a bit of a letdown how the history come together in the final chapter, at first sight I thought it was going to be better, but it's still pretty good.
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[Tlon]

Finally started God of War. It's strange playing it right after Vanquish, which is like an amplification of everything about the game. I died pretty frequently on the first few GoW missions but I got used to it, and I'm looking forward to finishing it. The cover system is less rigid than it is in Rockstar's recent games, with enemies rushing toward you. I didn't really expect that. I can't really add anything to the millions of words already written about it, and while I"m not sure why it spanwed so many imitators it does feel nicely dynamic.

Played a bit more Red Dead Redemption. Beat every stranger mission except Dedaleus and Son, i think.
_________________
Someday somethings coming
From way out beyond the stars
To kill us while we stand here
It will store our brains in mason jars

[Moogs]

I think you meant Gears of War.

[Tlon]

[Rud31]